Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Jillie said, “Kevin, how long can you stay?”

From a distance he was a male model, and up close he was a soiled boy edging toward man. His confused, confusing smile flared, and he said, “Whatever you say, Aunt Gillian.”

“I say you stay as long as you feel like.”

He clenched a fist and showed it to me, as if we had both been striving for admission. I nodded back and I guess it was a smile I showed him in return. Jillie took him upstairs and I went, as if casually, to the bookshelves in the living room. I found the book, a collection of poems by Alan Dugan that his mother had given me. There was a poem in it that began, “The curtains belly in the waking room.” Deborah had brought it to me, along with a wonderful antique book of flower prints for Jillie, and a bottle of Château Palmer that Arthur analyzed before he let us taste it. They were house gifts she bore, except that I knew which room the curtains had bellied in, and who had wakened with whom, and so did Deborah, and we were the only ones.

Kevin slept off his jet lag, and Jillie and I cast speculations that sank like stones in the sea.

“He might just be a little dopey from travel,” she said.

“You know what weariness is, and you know it’s something else.”

“It couldn’t be easy to march into somebody’s house after, Jesus, eleven or twelve years, it must be. And say, ‘Hello, my mother’s sleeping around and my father’s too busy, and I’m a little screwed up.’”

“No,” I said, “except he didn’t say or intimate or even hint sleeping around , Jillie.”

“She always fancied your ass.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Didn’t she.”

“Jillie.”

“And you were not, let’s say, unalert to that exquisite face or the body that went along with it. Could we say unalert?”

“It isn’t even a word, much less a smart idea. No.”

“No,” she said.

“That is correct.”

“No is correct.”

“I said so.”

“And so you did. Except I think she did fancy you, as they say.”

“Nobody says fancy you and nobody says unalert.”

We were behind the house, in a field that curved like a cheek, and we were walking slowly in the bright six o’clock light of a late-spring sunset. Jillie wore her New York Knicks baseball hat over a new haircut that was so short, she said, the breezes made her cold. She wore the hat, I thought, in mourning for the Knicks, who had once again failed to make progress in the playoffs. I took her hat off and ran my hand through her hair. She held my wrist and pulled my hand down onto her head.

“You are a bit of a frog and a fogey,” she said, “but I am not unalert to your cute little paunch and your much-fancied ass.”

“You don’t know any words,” I said. “Paunch is out these days.”

She looked at my midsection. “Out and over the belt, just about. But we can say belly if you like.”

As in what a curtain will do in a bedroom window in the cool air of morning, if you like.

EARLY SUNDAY, KEVIN was up by the time I returned from Rhinebeck with newspapers and German coffee cake. I could smell the shampoo and soap, but I could smell his clothing — he was wearing what he’d worn the day before — and, for all his scent of soap, there were bands of dirt beneath his nails, and his knuckles seemed dyed a darker brown than his broad hands. Jillie was in her jeans and one of my flannel shirts and she wasn’t wearing a brassiere, which I learned by following Kevin’s eyes as she walked across the kitchen with coffee and plates for the cake.

“Kevin,” I said, “are you all through with school?”

“I’m done with school, Uncle Bob.”

“Did you go to prep school?”

“I went to the American school.”

“And you graduated?”

“Sure.”

“Are you out on your own?”

“Whenever I want.”

“No, I mean are you living on your own. In an apartment, with a job and a life and all of that.”

“Jobs are hard,” Kevin said.

Jillie said, “Is there anything in the sports about the Knicks making a deal? So they can silence their critics? Bob?”

I finally said, “Ah.” She rarely had to do more than hoist a cardboard sign and beat on the congas for five or ten minutes before I understood these signals. Our child had been grown and away long enough for me to have forgotten the need in a household for an alternative language. I passed her the sports section of the Times and pretended that I was reading the editorials.

Kevin said, “This is so nice.”

I looked over the News of the Week in Review section to watch a giant tear glide out of each eye and down. It was like seeing a toddler in sorrow.

Jillie said, “Kevin, sweetheart. What? Are you homesick?”

He watched her alertly, as if she’d offered a clue. He thought. Then he said, “No, Aunt Gillian. No. We did this when I was a little boy. Remember? Breakfast? Newspapers. Cake. Everybody was happy.”

“But it isn’t happy at home,” Jillie said.

“No more. Dad gets mad. He goes away too much. Mommy does too. I stay with Martha. I go out on Cheyne Walk. I buy things for Martha. I go home. I watch the telly. It’s boring! Mostly, it’s quite terribly sad.”

The last five words came out in a voice that wasn’t his. I imagined we were hearing Martha’s intonations. He moved his neck as though his collar was tight. He scrubbed at his face with his cupped hands.

“All right, then, Kevin?” Jillie looked up. I had spoken in a kind of echo of the London I heard in his voice.

“Medicine,” he said. He smiled, as though divulging something lovely. His beautiful eyes were bright and moist. “I take tablets twice a day.” He opened a small gold pill box and removed something smaller than an aspirin, and white. “Once in the morning and once at night, and Bob’s your uncle.” He pointed at me. “And he is! Bob is my uncle!”

So what we had here was a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old boy who was, from time to time, about six years old, I thought. He was built like a goalie for Manchester United and he had been tied to the ground, like Gulliver, but by medicine instead of rope. And he fancied his Aunt Gillian in some fairly obvious ways. He had fled to us, or fled from them, and here he was, a young man charged with the energy of mission, of errand, a radiated electric sense that you might as well call purpose. He seemed to me a messenger who tarried, who chatted, who relished our anticipation of what he had come to say. But he didn’t, or he wouldn’t, or he couldn’t, say it. We were waiting, and so, perhaps, was he. Or maybe it was the medicine, or what the medicine held in check.

Gillian asked him if he felt well, and he told her of his stomach troubles on the flight. He proved how well he now felt by eating a large bite of coffee cake. I read in the Travel section that a dollar bought.60 of a pound. I tried to calculate what that meant a pound would cost and, when I arrived at something like twenty-four dollars, I knew what I was going to do. I waggled a finger at Jillie, which meant I’d return in a minute, and, in the extra first-floor bedroom that we shared as an office, I worked out what time it was in London. My answer seemed to be thirteen dollars, so I told the phone to hell with it and dialed the international code. After the hiss and the charge of static, I heard the double ring of an English phone. It went on and on. I thought I felt like Arthur, calling home of an afternoon and wondering why my wife wasn’t there to answer.

Kevin was at the sink with Jillie, leaning into her a little as they scraped and washed and dried.

I said, with the tact that won me to the hearts of deponents and courtroom adversaries, “Are you staying long in America, Kevin?”